Welcome to my fantasy setting, developed by my friends and I across at least three countries. It started off as a game we played while deployed in Afghanistan, and was intended to be a play and forget world, but something about the setting just stuck with me. Unfortunately the game was put on hiatus when one of my good friends, a player and codeveloper of the setting, Sgt. Scott Stream, was killed in an ied blast. It is in his memory that I continue the development of the world we created together now.

I am trying to make my contributions to this site as rules free as I can, because I want it to be usable as a setting regardless of what set of rules you decide to play with it. If someone else wants to contribute to this site by adding in a 3.5 ed stat block for an NPC, while someone else wants to contribute a 4ed representation of a homebrew monster, I am perfectly fine with that. Any contribution to the setting is valid, regardless of rule system used to describe the concept being created. Anything that I produce for the site will be Pathfinder Compatible and I will be using the Pathfinder SRD as a ruleset.

Themes:
There are several themes that this campaign setting is built upon.

Ascension: Where this setting takes it's name from. The world goes through cycles of shifting divinity, with new gods being born, ascending and dying with greater frequency than you might expect. The world is currently in one of those transitional stages and divinity is in flux. Because of this fact it makes an excellent staging point for Mythic Adventures.

High Magic: Magic in the realms of Aterra is treated as a discipline, almost a science in a lot of cases, and there are many varying types of tapping into the magic inherent in the land. These are largely specific to the races which practice them, though lower magic is largely universal to the races. The High Magic, that epic spellcasting which affects entire cities, is unique to it's practicioners and usually requires a certain kind of focus and/or ritual specific to that method to accomplish. Elves, for instance, use standing stones to harness the energies of the local geography; whearas gnomes use immaculately prepared gemstones as foci, and tribal orcs use ritual sacrifice.

Capitalism/Communism: The great war left many scars on it's participating countries and the world is slowly starting to rebuild. Ossia has been hit the hardest economically and is currently on the verge of a civil war as competing ideologies threaten to tear the country in half. The idea of Communism has been slowly spreading across the continent and a number of small skirmishes and proxy wars are starting to take place. Adventurers should expect to run into issues of countrymen violently disagreeing with social policies, the issue of unified currency and monetary worth, and frequent uprisings and changes in the political landscape.

Slavery/Emancipation: Another leftover from the great war was the issue of slavery. The Dwarves were the first to begin taking slaves; using Grandian POWs as slaves in their mines and factories to recoup the cost of raids and sabotage from the eastern orc lands during the war. When the war ended one Dwarf, Lady Ostia Blackhand, led the emancipation movement as well as declaring her home city a communist city-state. Since then slavery has been a hotly contested issue and war-slaves are constantly changing hands to keep them out of reach of the communists who seek to free them. Slave riots are a moderately common occurence at this point as Communist ideas spread across the continent.

A New Land: The Unkown North has been discovered recently. A great mountain ridge, which was once considered impassable and endless, was the dominant feature of Northern Caanas and was considered the northernmost point. During the war some epic magic and the release of the Tarrasque brought whole sections of the mountain down, revealing a vibrant northern countryside rich with untapped magical resources and savage inhabitants. A whole race of Dwarves, simply known as Northern Dwarves, have been the closest thing to a ruling power in the area for centuries; the Northern Dwarves however can not access magic in any form, due to an ancient divine curse, except as magical weapons and armour. As such the north is rich with power that nobody has utilized, and the monsters there are ferocious, vicious beasts, mutated by the wild magic energies running untapped across the land. The race to settle in the north has been a bloody, dangerous, but extremely rewarding endeavour and all the major powers of Caanas have been rushing to stake their claim.

The Great War: The Great War has been a huge influence on life across the continent. Though it has been 5 years since the cease fire was signed between Ossia and Grandia the nations have a vast amount of rebuilding to do. Countries across the continent have lost a great deal of life, wealth and infrastructure in the aftermath. Almost everyone was touched by the war in some way and though many fear that it could reignite the chances of all the nations committing to such a large scale war again is actually very slim. Much more real is the threat of riots, civil war, proxy wars, terrorism, espionage and shifiting political ideals; as well as rampant unemployment, poverty, and anarchy.

Life in the World of Conflict

Keeping Time

Each day in the WoC is 24 hours long, each hour generally referred to as a "bell". Certain nations may divide the day up differently, like Grandia which breaks the day into 6 4hour watches.
Each week has 7 days, for simplicity's sake they will be named the same as ours, Monday to Sunday, with Monday being the first day of the month. Each month, also named the same as ours, January to December, has 4 weeks in it for a standard 28 days each.
The lunar cycle is just as uniform as the months, with one full cycle each month, the moon being full on the 28th of each month.

Most nations have their own ways of noting the passage of years, like the Ossian calendar, which has year 0 as being the year of their nations founding, 1450 years ago. Thus the campaign starting year would be 1450 OB (Ossia's Birth), in Ossia. Other nations, such as the pirate islands of Tropicantis, mark the years starting from the last time the moon, sun and great stars aligned, making the year 3888 SA (Second Age).

Disclaimer/Paizo Community Use Policy

This website is host to my current campaign world of my own creation. I am attempting to stay entirely within the rules for acceptable use as detailed in Paizo's Open Game License. A few years ago however I used this wiki as a host for a game based on the Pathfinder Campaign Setting; I have attempted to remove all references and material from that game so as to not infringe on any intellectual property, but in the case that I have missed anything please let me know so that I can remove it.

Any images that I post will be either of my own creation, commissions, open source, or used under Paizo's Community Use Policy. There may be a few placeholder images still left on the site, if there are please let me know so they can be replaced.

"This website uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Publishing, LLC, which are used under Paizo's Community Use Policy. We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This [website, character sheet, or whatever it is] is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo Publishing. For more information about Paizo's Community Use Policy, please visit Community Use. For more information about Paizo Publishing and Paizo products, please visit paizo.com."

Paizo's awesome SRDThis link above is actually a link to an online index of all the info from the books, hyperlinked and everything, made and maintained by the publisher. Paizo rocks!PFSRD Awesome secondary SRD resource.